REHABILITATION REQUIRES A JOB AND A PLACE TO LIVE

Legislation to authorize the Correction Department to reduce
sentences for prisoners who complete self-improvement programs is
agitating minority Republicans as it gets rubber-stamping from the
Democratic majority in the General Assembly. Republicans say that
while the bill is dressed up as a public-safety measure, it is meant
only to save money by reducing the prison population and will
increase crime by parolees. Some prisoners convicted of violence, the
Republicans note, might qualify for the rehabilitative programs and
then earlier release.

But of course it probably has been decades since anything good at the
state Capitol has been done for the right reasons, and if someone's
ulterior motives disqualified legislation, there might never be any
law at all. Governor Malloy and prison administrators say the
rehabilitative programs will do some good, and the chance of earning
sentence reductions can be a valuable disciplinary tool with prisoners.

It sounds plausible enough, and if there really is any rehabilitation
to it, it would be silly to deny it to even to those perpetrators of
violent crimes if they are going to be released eventually anyway.
But it will be a miracle if such programs push Connecticut's
recidivism rate below even 50 percent. In many cases Connecticut is
far too slow rather than far too quick to imprison -- see the case of
the career criminals turned mass murderers Steven Hayes and Joshua
Komisarjevsky -- and for most prisoners, by the time they get to
prison, their lives are already almost irretrievable; they are
already too damaged psychologically and beyond most productive
purpose, as well as without job skills.

Which is not to say that there's nothing to be done here.

The most efficient way to reduce crime is simply to legislate less of
it, which is easily done, since most crime in Connecticut, as
throughout the country, is drug-related, a consequence of the
criminal-justice premium built into the cost of illegal drugs. People
put their lives at risk with drugs and when it catches them the
government makes sure that their lives are damaged. The criminal
justice approach to the drug problem has plainly failed; drug abuse
is as prevalent as ever and this approach serves only as an
employment program for police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges,
probation officers, and prison guards.

The critical but unasked questions remain: How much drug
criminalization can Connecticut afford as it enters upon the biggest
tax increase in its history? Could the consequences of letting
dopeheads get stoned in peace, or leaving the federal government to
pursue them on its own, be worse than the consequences of
criminalizing their intoxication, consequences including so much
violent crime and the uninhabitability of Connecticut's cities?

Discussion of reducing the penalty for possession of a small amount
of marijuana is the closest anyone at the state Capitol can get to
this question.

But even assuming that it will be a long time before the drug issue
can be discussed seriously, there is something to be done here. With
or without the rehabilitation legislation, Connecticut's prisons will
continue to disgorge prisoners into hard times where there are no
jobs for 10 percent of the law-abiding population. With the Malloy
administration and the legislature's Democratic majority determined
to choke the private economy to death with taxes, Connecticut has no
prospects for job growth. In these circumstances the rehabilitation
problem for prisoners is not inside prison but outside.

For without jobs and housing waiting for prisoners upon their
release, prison rehabilitation programs are a waste. But such jobs
and housing well might pay for themselves in diminished crime. And
state government, municipal governments, and charitable organizations
have infinite needs for manual labor, from cleaning up roads,
railroad grades, and stream beds to maintaining public facilities to
repairing delapidated property.

Yes, locating halfway houses for parolees is always difficult
politically, but a municipality's accepting a halfway house could be
the price of free state-paid manual labor for local government. And
the annual cost of paying a parolee a modest salary -- say, $400 per
week -- and giving him a room to himself with a little privacy in
which a psyche might begin to normalize, not just dumping him at a
shelter madhouse, would be far less than the annual cost of imprisonment.

Surely state government could arrange a parolee hiring program with
municipal governments and charities. Otherwise, earlier releases will
mean only more crime.